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make, the space rocket. He was a master at selling his one product to the only customers who could ever afford it, a nation’s rulers. The big, blond man who was gently funny and firm, always so firm in his purpose, had a certain flexible flair for making powerful men believe in him.
    And because rulers survive by shaping and reflecting their nation’s collective psyche, von Braun came to their aid in fomenting mass imagination, mass desire. Von Braun made it his business to understand the workings of so gossamer a thing as “national prestige” and what might be a “blow” to it. Wherever he happened to find himself, in Hitler’s Germany or Ike’s America, Wernher von Braun wrote the sales jingles for his product in the local dialect.
    As a teenager, von Braun already was learning these skills of salesmanship from a mentor, the mathematician Hermann Oberth, famous for his pioneering calculations and speculations about space travel. In 1923 Oberth grabbed attention with a slim volume called
The Rocket into Planetary Space
, and in 1929 he published a greatly expanded version,
Roads to Space Travel.
In between, the beetle-browed professor with the black mustache signed with the film director Fritz Lang, who was looking for some spectacular way to publicize his upcoming space rocket movie,
The Girl in the Moon.
Oberth took studio money on the promise he would build the first honest spaceship, a two-stage manned rocket, and blast it off at the movie premiere. The professor, not surprisingly, was still tinkering with the very beginnings of his prototype well after the film premiere had come and gone.
    But Oberth’s vision had galvanized some young rocket enthusiasts in Berlin who formed themselves into the German Society for Space Travel, and one of these young men was Wernher von Braun. Eighteen years old in the year 1930, Wernher vonBraun came to Hermann Oberth and asked to work for free on the rocket motor that was left over from
The Girl in the Moon.
    I n the Piper Cherokee we are flying, my father and I, somewhere between Earth and the other planets who look down upon us. I know the planets are there even when the sky is bright with daylight. I have been told this by my father, who always seems very pleased to be asked any question about the planets. I know that the planets will be there every hour of the day forever, and that the planets are connected to my father’s work. To cover the empty wall of my new bedroom, my father has given me a map of the solar system, and so the planets are the first things I look at upon awakening. As I lay in bed studying their various faces made up of moon shadows and swirling gas patterns, Jupiter seems to me big and friendly, Saturn haughty with all its rings, Pluto sullen at finding itself frozen at the outer edge of outer space. The solar system is a crowded and important place with a rectangular border, I can see by the map, and a boy like me should know his way around it. Why else would my father have placed the solar system next to my bed?
    A fter the end of the Second World War, Wernher von Braun, by then the world’s leading authority on rocketry, came to live in the United States and began to sell his space rocket dreams, in many varieties of ways, to his new customer base. Upon arrival, he wasted no time dashing off a short fiction about going to Mars and meeting the green Martians who lived there. Over the years he summoned the biggest possible names, Charles Darwin and God, as endorsers for his cause. He said going to the moon meant “a completely new step in the evolution of man,” and that “we are extending this God-given brain and these God-given hands to their outermost limits.”
    A good and early example of the supple appeal of Wernher von Braun lies in the article he contributed to a 1952 edition of
Collier’s
magazine, a special issue titled: “Man Will Conquer Space
Soon
.” The Cold War was on, of course, and so von Braun’s glossy prophecy began this